The Shrekoning: Shrek: Swamp Fun with Phonics (PC)

While it’s not unusual at all to find a Disney character slapped onto an educational game, Shrek’s deliberate rejection of Disney’s ways made it seem odd that the franchise would still find its way to such a similar niche. The Shrek franchise in general was swallowed by the merchandising beast over time though, but with Shrek: Swamp Fun with Phonics we can again trace the issue mostly to TDK who had no issue slapping the Shrek brand on any game idea they could. And so, Dreamworks’s deliberately gross ogre ended up the star of a game that is nominally meant to teach children how to read and write but was made without any idea on how to actually do so.

Shrek: Swamp Fun with Phonics is, oddly enough, a sidescrolling platformer in terms of how you play it, but the game places educational activities within the platforming space to serve as your goal. Technically you do not need to complete the phonics-related objectives, the short levels completing if you guide Shrek to the end where a happy jumping Donkey serves as the goal. However, you will earn points that contribute to a grand score total if you do take the time to engage with more than the level geometry, floating letters and words up for grabs and serving either as correct answers or damaging deceptions, there being ten correct answers per level and a variable amount of false responses to potentially bump into.

The platforming itself is simple and functional, a fortunate fact since it means a young kid made to play this won’t often be bumping into a wrong answer by mistake. The floating words and letters do sometimes float a bit in your path so jumping down from a floating platform might lead to accidental contact, but you only take a bit of damage for a wrong answer so a mistake won’t hurt you in the long run. Levels do feature different enemies to watch out for on top of the incorrect answers. Bats and bees fly up and down, spiders lower down on strands of silk, and simple hazards like spikes and mud dish out a little damage and disappear on contact so you won’t be hurt by them again. There are only two level types, the backdrop either being the swamp Shrek calls home or the run down castle where the dragon lurks in the film, but while you can see many characters like Dragon and the Dwarves on the topic selection screen, only Shrek and Donkey will actually appear in the playable portions of the title.

Speaking of the topics, Shrek: Swamp Fun with Phonics seems surprisingly robust in covering different difficult phonics subjects on the surface. There are three difficulty levels, the first being extremely simple ideas like capital letters but as you get into the second and third you find some surprising subject names. You’ll find the game covering things like diphthongs, digraphs, and ending blends, but there’s one major issue with how it chooses to cover those topics. Rather than explaining what any of those three things are, when you enter the stage you are simply provided an example of a diphthong or digraph to find floating around in the air. The player is given no educational context for what these terms mean, and you aren’t even identifying whether or not the words you’re collecting contain these concepts. Instead it will give you a specific diphthong to look for so all you need to do is recognize that the words floating around contain the two letters you were given, making this more a word search than a real test of your knowledge. Funnily enough though the game doesn’t even seem to have a full handle of phonics since it believes “ill” is an ending blend, but ending blends require two consonants that make different noises.

However, that issue with the diphthongs and ending blends actually extends to almost every subject. If you’re told to look for a lower case letter, you do have a voice over introduce the challenge, but the bottom left of the screen will always show that letter. A kid who is learning their letters wouldn’t be learning what lower case means or really learning what a letter shape sounds like, they would just be finding any words that contain that letter that is lingering on screen. The majority of the subjects face this issue, even the more advanced concepts still showing the player the actual letters they’re looking for in the bottom left to eliminate any need to actually retain the information or understand its role in reading and writing.

There are, thankfully, a few subjects that would require a young player to do more than recognize shapes. In Alphabetization you are given a word and told to find words that either come before or after it in alphabetical order. Syllables will keep the reminder you need to find 2 or 3 syllable words in the bottom left, but a child would still have to know what a syllable is and sound out the words before them to see if they count, although including the word “zinnia” as an answer seems unfair since few kids would even recognize the word.

The game is still taking more of an exam approach rather than actually teaching the subjects, but at least some do require phonics knowledge instead of being about shape recognition, although there is a problem that arises even in ones that almost worked. You might pick the Long Vowels topic believing that a kid would have to be able to sound out whether something like an A or O is long in a word, but the game’s health system is so forgiving you can nearly get away with grabbing every word with that vowel in the level. Shrek can get damaged seven times before he finally lays down and goes to sleep, the level restarting if you’ve forced him into taking such a cat nap. However, there are onions floating about he can grab for a little health, meaning you can often clear a level even after making over seven mistakes. You do not lose points for taking the damage, so as long as you can complete the level it doesn’t matter how many wrong answers you touched, further lessening its potential not only as a learning tool but even as a way of examining if a kid already knew the knowledge required going in.

Each difficulty level does feature a Challenge option amidst its subjects. Usually within a subject, you beat the level and then are made to play again but with something new but relevant to that topic to find, although the pool of words and subjects to find can seem pretty small. Challenge, however, will take every subject under a difficulty setting’s umbrella and place them back to back, the player needing to beat lightly varying levels to earn themselves a printable degree as their reward for beating it. The health is refilled between levels and you still don’t really need to either avoid damage or collect every right answer, but these degrees at least give something to shoot for other than building up a running high score.

THE VERDICT: A sorry excuse for a learning tool, Shrek: Swamp Fun with Phonics does nothing to teach its subject of choice and barely even tries to test the player’s knowledge. It pays lip service to advanced subjects like diphthongs but mostly just has you identify floating words that contain certain letters, the overly forgiving health system meaning you barely even need to pay attention to whether or not you’re grabbing correct words during straightforward and short platforming levels. Its approach to syllables and alphabetization at least require you to think if you want to get the maximum score and the Challenge subjects give you a proper goal to shoot for, but Shrek: Swamp Fun with Phonics is mostly a game of symbol recognition disconnected from phonics and not even difficult if considered as a visual challenge instead.

And so, I give Shrek: Swamp Fun with Phonics for PC…

A TERRIBLE rating. Shrek: Swamp Fun with Phonics keeps its head above the swamp water solely on the back of how perfectly functional the platforming is. You can breeze through most levels, jumping around easily enough and at least having a few enemies around or mushrooms to bounce off of does mean sometimes you need to do more than move forward. Grabbing the floating letters and words is technically not even required unless you do care about that running point tally but since every difficulty provides equal points to your total it’s not impressive to get a high score when its a matter of time and not intelligence or skill. The inoffensive but not exciting platforming still wouldn’t be fun in a normal game although it would get the job done, but if it was the means of engaging with some actual phonics learning or tests then it could at least be viewed as slightly more interactive than filling out answers on a piece of paper. However, the tests here are more about recognizing the letters in the bottom left than actually identifying what the subject is about. The voice over feels like it could have at least introduced the concept and maybe after a few digraphs it could make you have to identify words with digraphs on your own, but it just repeats a small set as if that somehow helps you retain what a digraph even is. Even when it’s on the right path with syllables it still feels like the game could at least have a small intro setting up the concept, but the game does not seem concerned with either teaching or providing much fun.

It’s a sad but obvious truth that Shrek: Swamp Fun with Phonics was not really assembled with any real intent on imparting phonics knowledge to children. This PC game slithers itself into a dangerous niche, a parent potentially getting this for their child since they like Shrek but the kid’s complaints about its poor quality would be brushed off under the parent’s mistaken belief this is somehow educational. At least it doesn’t shy away from Shrek iconography, the results screen covered in slime with squishy gross noises, bugs appearing when you collect the right words, and you can see characters from the movie on menus. If there was somehow some value in a child being able to find the same letters seen in the bottom left of the screen inside words than Shrek: Swamp Fun with Phonics would have done its job albeit without much entertainment value, but this educational game is mostly an unexciting failure. There is another Shrek: Swamp Fun title that covers early math and it seems like the design featured here might lend itself better to that subject, so perhaps the concept was rejiggered into a phonics game despite this gameplay approach making no sense for a video game nominally meant to teach you how to read and write.